Confidential

Your AI negotiation copilot.
Fair value, for everyone.

August 2026 · counterwell.ai
Marketplace Local Offer Cars
The team

We do the research. We build the product.

Claire ChenFounder
  • Mathematics
  • 6 published papers · ICML ×3, ICLR ×2, AAAI oral (top 4.7%)
  • LLM Agents · Reinforcement Learning · Game Theory
The problem

You are guessing. They are not.

Sofa · $400
Any chance on $350?
Price is firm at $400. You can pick up today.
Ok, I’ll take it.
One more message, never sent.
Theyevery day · hundreds of deals
Youevery few years · one deal
$400a sofa
$40,000a car
$400,000a job offer
Money left on the table.
The solution

The whole negotiation.

1

Read it

Screenshot, voice, typing.

2

Find it

The ones that fit.

3

Write it

In your words.

4

Automate it

Multiple sellers. Multiple rounds.

5

Practice it

Before you call.

Marketplace Local Offer Cars The last two are what a chatbot cannot do.
See it work

A live demo of all four.

recorded in the live product · the worked examples are labelled on screen
What people said

82% signed up on the spot.

survey · 60 Caltech students
Backing

$38,000 in, before any investor.

$20,000
Ryan Summer Program
$10,000
Bill Gross Prize
$5,000
Tinker credits
THINKING MACHINES
$3,000
Demetriades Prize
Why we win

Trained to please. Or trained on the price.

General-purpose models

trained to please

↓ it concedes

trained on the price
RLVR

↑ it counters

Four LLM negotiation papers, co-authored by our founder
The research

The smallest model got the best price.

46.27%
Counterwell 30B
our research model
28.35%
GPT-5.4
latest frontier
23.81%
DeepSeek
V3.1 · 671B
19.69%
Humans
our own team
The discount obtained, across 30 real deals on Facebook Marketplace. Ten times smaller than the models it beats.
Four LLM negotiation papers, co-authored by our founder
Competition

For you, and built to win.

Built to win
Built to agree
B2B
B2C
ADPAmazonUberRealPageWorkday
SalesforceHubSpot
ChatGPTClaudeGeminiLevels.fyiHoney
How we make money

You pay the way you deal.

Everyday
MarketplaceLocal
$4.99 / mo · $9.99 / mo
The big ones
CarsOffer
$39 / mo · $49 / mo
Everything
Counterwell Pro
$59 / mo · $179 / year
Free trial to start negotiating. Monthly plans cancel any time, unlimited inside the month; annual options are available on selected plans.
Market potential

Four markets. One platform.

Money in play, every year, US
$200B+
MarketplaceUS secondhand goods
$842B
LocalHome services
$1.8T
Cars54M vehicles, new and used
$13T
OfferWages and salaries
Worth to us, at ~$50 per acquired paying customer
$500M
expectedfrom 10 million paying customers acquired
$50M1M customers0.7% of US households
$100M2M customers1.5%
$250M5M customers3.7%
$500M10M customers7.4%
The plan

The building is done. Now the users.

Built All four products, finished
today
What the campaign answers
What a signup costs
How many convert to paid
How many sellers reply
Which market to lead with
no campaign has run yet
The ask

$1.3M, once we can show you it works.

Raising, once the first campaign reports
$1.3M
Pre-seed. Eighteen months. The product is built.
52%People Founder full-time and two engineers
19%First users One campaign at a time, then scale the winner
8%Legal and running costs Incorporation, terms, the car review
3%Office Remote for six months, then San Francisco
2%AI and infrastructure Cheaper than the people by a mile
16%Reserve Held back
No campaign has run yet. We run one on prize money to get the first paying customers and a real cost per customer — then raise the $1.3M on those numbers.

Thank you.

Appendix

The films, the papers, and where every number came from.
Appendix

The four films, in full.

recorded in the live product · media/ travels beside this file
Counterwell Marketplace · live

One button, on the page you are already looking at.

The browser extensionSitting beside the listing. One tap reads the page and writes your opening message — nothing to paste.
The full negotiationEvery round after that: what they said, what to send, and how far you are from your ceiling.
Marketplace
Counterwell Local · live

One sentence in. Five companies out.

Say it, or tap a trade. No form.
Names, ratings, review counts, phones, distance — live from Google, with each company’s own photo.
  • Ranked on the evidence. A rating counts for more when more reviews stand behind it, so a 5.0 from 18 does not beat a 5.0 from 76. Google’s own order settles ties and nothing else.
  • Distance can change it — deliberately. Somebody has to drive to you.
Localworking · live Google data
Counterwell Offer · live

Your offer, broken down —
and what to ask for.

Check the numbers$316,200 in year one, $276,200 every year after — because $40,000 of it lands once. The letter never puts those two numbers side by side.
The planLead with the competing offer because its deadline is sooner. Ask for equity, not base — $60,000 to $115,000, settle at $90,000. Words you can say out loud, with no blanks.
Offerbuilt · running today
Counterwell Cars · live

The lowest price is not the cheapest deal.

Kestrel Toyota’s sticker is $996 cheaper — and costs $2,361 more once the rate and the term are counted.

Every offer, cheapest firstEach card carries its gap to the cheapest.
Or drawn, on one rulerEvery charge split into the same four buckets, so a low price with a big fee stops looking like one.
Cars
Appendix

The four papers.

Instructing LLMs to Negotiate using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards arXiv 2604.09855 · public · the 30B benchmark on the previous slide
Strategic Bargaining in Multi-Buyer Markets: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards for LLM Negotiations arXiv 2607.05863 · public · under review at Management Science
Learning to Recommend: Multi-Item Bilateral Negotiation via LLM Sellers under submission
Learning to Sell: Multi-Product Portfolio Allocation via LLM Agents under Communication Constraints under submission
Claire Chen, co-author on all four
Appendix

Where those numbers come from.

FigureWhat it isSource
$13.0TUS wages and salaries paid, 2025 Bureau of Economic Analysis, national accounts
$842BUS home services market, 2026 Mordor Intelligence — US home services market definition
$1.8TUS vehicles sold in 2025: 16.3M new × $50,000, plus 37.8M used × $25,730 Cox Automotive for the volumes; Kelley Blue Book for both prices
$200B+US secondhand goods bought in a year — furniture, electronics, tools, sporting goods, clothes. Vehicles are not in it, so the row above is not counted twice. $306.5B projected for 2030 OfferUp / GlobalData, 2025 Recommerce Report
$50Expected revenue per acquired paying customer, blended across the four products and their expected tenures Our own prices and how long each kind of customer stays — worked out on the next slide
134.8MUS households, 2025 — what the percentages under the bars are a share of US Census Bureau
$50 is the modelled expected revenue per acquired paying customer, blended across the current plans and their expected tenures. The cash-flow projection is cohort-based: a customer contributes receipts only while they are active. Counterwell takes no percentage of transaction value, so the market figures above do not directly determine our revenue.
sources checked 12 August 2026
Appendix

What a customer pays, and what the AI costs to serve them.

Expected revenue per acquired paying customer
They came forPrice × modelled tenureOf 100Together
Marketplace$4.99 / mo × 8-month modelled tenure = $4050$2,000
Local$9.99 / mo × 2.5 = $2515$375
Cars$39 / mo × 1 month = $3915$585
Offer$49 / mo × 1 month = $4912$588
Counterwell Pro$179 for the year8$1,432
100 paying customers100$4,980
$4,980 ÷ 100 ≈ $50 each. Cars and Offer are bought for one month — that is how long the job takes — and Marketplace is modelled at eight. Sensitivity: if Marketplace customers instead take the $49 annual plan, the blend is about $54.
AI inference cost — per acquired customer, over the same tenure
What they use over that tenureAI costAI-level margin
About 36 negotiations$2.3894.1%
About 6 jobs$1.0795.7%
6 cars looked at, 1 bought$2.3194.1%
3 offers, 6 calls rehearsed$1.8296.3%
All four, heavily$5.1897.1%
Moonshot’s published rates: $0.95 per million tokens in, $4.00 out. A whole car negotiation is 39¢. AI cost applies a full year’s usage allowance over the shorter modelled tenure, which is deliberately conservative.
$50 in, $2.33 of AI cost out — a 95.3% margin at the AI level. Each product serves a different customer need. The $50 is a blended planning assumption across customer types and expected tenure, not an assumption that one person buys several products.
prices checked 14 August 2026
Appendix

Where the $1.3M goes.

AmountWhat it pays forOf the round
rounded
$210,000Founder at $140,000 a year for all eighteen months — within the $132–153k seed-stage band16%
$219,000A founding engineer on $175,000 a year from month four. Median base is $195,000; $175,000 is the seed rate, trading cash for equity17%
$120,000A second engineer on $160,000 a year from month ten, once there are users to serve9%
$121,000Payroll tax, benefits and insurance, at 22% of salary9%
$250,000Marketing — paid customer acquisition, modelled at $4 per signup. $4/signup and 8% signup-to-paid conversion are pre-pilot assumptions; actual campaign results will replace both19%
$100,000Incorporation, consumer terms and privacy, the automotive review, accounting and tools8%
$30,000AI and infrastructure — model calls behind every negotiation, quote and letter, plus operating headroom, for all eighteen months2%
$42,000A shared office in San Francisco from month seven, at $3,500 a month — remote until then3%
$208,000Runway and contingency reserve16%
$1.3M = $1,092,000 of planned spend + $208,000 held as reserve. Under the current model the raise acquires roughly 5,000 paying customers over eighteen months, projecting about $216,000 of customer cash receipts. The model assumes six months remote, then twelve in a shared San Francisco office. The next page shows the cash-flow timing.
Appendix

18-month cash flow projection.

Cumulative
customers acquired		Active paying
at period end		 Operating spendCustomer
cash receipts		Net cash burn
Months 1–6750520$235,000$28,000$207,000
Months 7–122,2501,240$377,000$66,000$311,000
Months 13–185,0002,300$480,000$122,000$358,000
Month 18 / 18-month total5,0002,300 $1,092,000$216,000$876,000
Spending is budgeted; customer receipts are projected. Receipts are cohort-based: a customer pays only during the modelled tenure for their product, so cumulative customers acquired and active paying customers differ. Marketing is phased 15% / 30% / 55% across the three periods, as the channel moves from validation to scaling. Some receipts from customers acquired late in the runway fall beyond month eighteen.

Acquisition is modelled at $4/signup and 8% signup-to-paid conversion, both pre-pilot assumptions — together they imply a $50 cost per paying customer acquired. Month-18 customer cash receipts are approximately $21,800.
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